I want to help build a just, beautiful future. I work on special projects at OpenAI and I run New Science. I’m most inspired by Augustine of Hippo, Aaron Swartz, Freeman Dyson, Scott Alexander, and Gwern.
Feel free to email me at alexey@guzey.com and to follow me on Twitter. If you’d like to ask for advice, please email advice@guzey.com.
Recent
Jul 30, Why I believe in AGI (again)
May 22, What I'm thinking about these days
Apr 11, Links for Q1 2025
personal favorites
- Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Omens of exceptional talent & Cursed omens of exceptional talent
- People who are going to change the world
- Intelligence killed genius
- What I’m thinking about these days
- Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now (I will read the draft and give feedback to anybody who decides to write something as a result of reading this)
one-pagers
- On impact
- Losing the idea of progress
- Why you shouldn’t build your career around existential risk
- On deification
- On YIMBI
- I’m terrified of old people
2024 broke & unemployed arc
- I’m broke, divorced, and unemployed.
- On suicide
- I ran out of money a year ago, spent the last of my savings on a prostitute in Hong Kong, and became a commie.
Advice
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice
- lifehacks
- Advice from Tyler Cowen & (unauthorized) advice from guest 04
- College Q&A
- It Is Your Responsibility to Follow Up
- How to make friends over the internet
- I no longer believe that it’s possible to achieve extremely high productivity sustained over long periods of time working on difficult projects alone, so now I spend the majority of my working time co-working with my friends over video in my virtual gather.town office
- Writing advice
AI
- Why I believe in AGI (again)
- How my views on AI changed every year 2017-2024
- Is AI alignment on track? Is it progressing… too fast?
- A Two sentence Jailbreak for GPT-4 and Claude & Why Nobody Knows How to Fix It
- Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
- AI Alignment Is Turning from Alchemy Into Chemistry
Metascience/education
- Is anything inherently difficult?
- The ouroboros of academic peer review
- Abolish the NIH
- thoughts on science, science literacy, and replication
- Translating an issue of Nature
most notable
- My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep.
- Ideas not mattering is a psyop
- (Autistic) visionaries are not natural-born leaders
- Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
- questions
- Napoleon: a Cautionary Tale for Young Idealists
- How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation
- The Effects on Cognition of Sleeping 4 Hours per Night for 12-14 Days: a Pre-Registered Self-Experiment
- Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit?
- Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research
- What is the alternative to utilitarianism?
- Neurodiversity, mutants, and organisational design
- Every thought about giving and taking advice I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible
- Forecasting humans becoming generally intelligent with biological anchors: year 10,000,000,000,002,2022
- You are a morale-driven machine
- Tools / Gear
- Links
- Issues with Bloom et al’s “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation
- Research Ideas
- Best of Holden Karnofsky and Sam Altman
- Gwern’s Most Important Writing (in essays, tweets, book reviews, and other forms)
- Most Important Slate Star Codex Posts
- Don’t believe self-reported data
- William MacAskill misrepresents the evidence underlying his key arguments in “Doing Good Better”
- 16 questions posed & answered by Leslie Berlin’s book “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age”
- Theses on Sleep
Personal
- Q&A with my high school self: helping 14-16 year old Alexey to deal with his emotions, to ask for help, to talk to people (and his dad), to learn, to get things done.
- On Friendship and on Finding Your People
- 17-20: a Retrospective on Four Years in College
- My journal: years of depression and self-loathing; learning to accept myself and others; overcoming video game addiction
- My Favorite Movies, TV Shows, Books, Podcasts, Music, Video games
- People and Things I Would Fund If I Were a Billionaire
Fiction & Art
- How I got to #1 spot on Hacker News and why you should never try doing the same
- Why You Should Not Go on a Tinder Date with Me
- Dating
- RAPIDLY PRESS X TO REFUSE TO COME TO TERMS WITH YOUR OWN MORTALITY
- A dying snake
- Poems
notable
- Ramanujan, Einstein, Tolstoy, Napoleon, Richard Muller, and Michael Jackson on God
- Why We Likely Underappreciate the Pace of Technological Progress
- Contra Scott Alexander’s “The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life”
- Fun Economic Facts
- Interview with Ben Kuhn about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community #interview
- Why I switched my newsletters from Substack and Mailchimp to Buttondown
- Polynomial Time Reductions and the P vs NP problem
- Three Questions for Russia
- Online courses and textbooks I recommend
- Where does talent come from? How easy is it to discover talent?
- Tweet rot
- Low tech stuff I recommend
- Can We Trust Peter Turchin?
- Scientific experiments I want to fund
- Philosophers for Sale
- Julian Jaynes and the Ancient Tablets
- The most we can say about earnings of Substack’s top writers
- Who is the real prophet of longtermism: Will MacAskill or Sam Altman?
LaTeX
- Matec Notes – a multivariable calculus coursebook
- How Our Commitments Slip Away From Us (pdf, my bachelor’s thesis)
Book highlights
Nostalgic